Key takeaways
- The world’s richest 1% own more wealth than the bottom 50% of the global population combined, and luxury fashion’s consumer base is narrowing in the same direction, with the top 7% of shoppers now accounting for 50% of spend.
- From Vivienne Westwood’s decades of activism to Stella McCartney’s decision to eliminate leather and fur, fashion has a history of political conviction. But the runway remains one of the most exclusive and expensive spaces in the world, and that has always complicated the message.
- At Paris Fashion Week, Matières Fécales staged a show about the 99% and made the case that political fashion and commercial success are not mutually exclusive.
Place de la République has seen a lot. The “Je suis Charlie” vigils in January 2015, the “Nuit Debout” protests in 2016, every march that needed a focal point. On September 28, Matières Fécales took it over for their Paris Fashion Week SS27 show, and staged what I think is the most genuinely political fashion moment I’ve seen on a runway in years.
The collection was called The 99 Percent. Steven Raj Bhaskaran, who co-founded the brand with Hannah Rose Dalton after the two met at pattern-cutting school in Montreal, built it as a direct sequel to last season’s The 1 Percent, which dissected and mocked the visual codes of extreme wealth. This time, he turned the lens the other way: 99 models of color, his own mother, sister and three-year-old niece walking alongside them, pieces that moved between tenderness and aggression — sari-draped jersey dresses unravelling into trailing hems one moment, facial spikes and shredded denim the next — and a finale in which a model in gold lamé carried two slumped dummies of white men in suits, their eyes covered with money.
It was a show that asked a difficult yet timely question: who fashion is really for, and who it has decided to leave outside.
A growing distance
The question Matières Fécales posed on that runway is not only a fashion question. It is the question of this moment, across every industry, every institution, every political conversation happening anywhere with any honesty in it. The world’s richest 1% own more wealth than the bottom 50% of the global population combined.
Data presented at the RLC Leadership Series in London this September shows that the ultra-high-net-worth consumer — 1% of luxury shoppers — accounts for 27% of luxury spend. The top 7% account for 50% of it. At the same time, Bloomberg Intelligence data shows the aspirational luxury consumer has been systematically pushed out, not through lack of interest, but through successive markups across the major houses that turned entry-level luxury into something that no longer meaningfully exists.
This, of course, is a story that runs through housing markets, through education access, through the widening gap between the cost of living and the ability to meet it. Wealth has concentrated, access has contracted, and fashion, for all its self-mythology about creativity and culture, reflects that reality as precisely as any other industry.
Radical ideas, luxury prices
Fashion activism has a longer history than the industry’s current silence on the subject might suggest. Vivienne Westwood made it impossible to ignore. Starting in the early 1970s from a shop on the King’s Road in London, she and Malcolm McLaren built the visual language of punk, dressing the Sex Pistols and a generation of young people who had no interest in the establishment’s version of culture or beauty.
She spent the decades that followed proving that fashion and political conviction are not mutually exclusive. Climate change, nuclear disarmament, fracking, Julian Assange — Westwood turned up for all of it, in person and on the runway. She drove a tank to David Cameron’s constituency home to oppose fracking. She sent models down the catwalk carrying protest banners. She built the Climate Revolution campaign into a sustained part of her brand’s identity. When she died in December 2022, aged 81, she left behind both a couture house and an unusually extensive record of political and environmental activism.
Stella McCartney made a different kind of statement. When she launched her brand in 2001, the decision to use no leather and no fur was a direct challenge to the materials luxury fashion had been built on. What a cultural moment that was! The industry noticed, consumers noticed, and a conversation began that has since reshaped how the broader market thinks about materials and supply chains. The problem with McCartney’s position today is that it has been mainstreamed. What was once a provocation is now a selling point, and with that comes a certain loss of force.
Fashion and politics make for uneasy companions, partly because fashion is still assumed, by many, to be frivolous by nature, and partly because the catwalk is one of the most exclusive, expensive and tightly closed spaces in the world. This is a contradiction the industry has never quite managed to resolve.
So, does it matter?
Which brings us back to Place de la République, and to the question Matières Fécales were bold enough to ask out loud. Bhaskaran and Dalton, like Westwood, built their following entirely outside the traditional fashion system, and carried that origin story directly onto the Paris Fashion Week SS27 runway.
Bhaskaran addressed the contradiction directly: a luxury brand taking over the people’s square for a show about the poor and disenfranchised. “This is an opportunity to showcase that our culture, our voices, our perspective are just as important as all of those who are normally championed in the luxury space,” he said. “Proof that you can be bold, you can be honest, you can be uncensored, and you can also be commercial.”
Does political fashion matter? The honest answer is that it matters in proportion to the sincerity behind it. A slogan on a T-shirt costs nothing. A show that takes aim at the establishment from inside the industry itself, well, that shows conviction. Whether you can afford the clothes is besides the point. The image stays. The question it leaves behind stays: who is fashion really for, and does the industry have the nerve to answer honestly?
